75 years of the Munich Chamber Orchestra: Anyone who expected a pause for nostalgic reflection at the first concert of the MKO’s anniversary season was pleasantly disappointed. The venerable ensemble is looking courageously and confidently toward the future. The centerpiece was Dieter Ammann’s viola concerto “No Templates,” written for violist Nils Mönkemeyer, who also gave the German premiere at the Prinzregententheater. The title itself is a statement of intent: no templates, no blueprints.
Mönkemeyer doesn’t simply perform in front of an accompanying orchestra; he negotiates a new form with it. The result is a remarkable fusion of dialogue. His viola vibrates, hisses, hesitates, and leads—somewhere between force and a pale timbre—into a world whose origins often remain unclear due to the subtle instrumentation. The form is shaped above all by the magnificently and versatilely deployed percussion. This gives the sound direction without confining it. Ammann writes music that evades easy grasp—and in doing so, takes the listener along for the ride.
Swinging Haydn
Before Ammann electrifies the sound, Joseph Haydn opens it into the light. In his early Sixth Symphony (“Le Matin”), the sun rises. From the podium, Bas Wiegers gives this dawning light space, allowing lines to emerge with a breathing quality. The MKO’s transparent and homogeneous sound carries the music with a chamber-musical alertness—precise, agile, and with that lightness that makes Haydn start to swing.
After Haydn’s clear order and Ammann’s centrifugal energy, Charles Ives opens a space of memory. His Third Symphony (“The Camp Meeting”) sounds like a conversation with the past—restrained, thoughtful, human. Wiegers chooses a warm, at times lush approach that smooths out some of the edges of this contradictory, often austere, and deliberately untidy sound language. It’s beautiful—perhaps too beautiful. That evening, Haydn let the dawn break, Ammann broke it down into spectra, and Ives captured the shadow—and all three demonstrated that structure is not a cage, but a springboard. For its season opener, the Munich Chamber Orchestra has found its confident leap forward.
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